6/08/2005 @ 10:46AM

Alarms Over China

Press freedom advocates voiced alarm over China’s latest effort at controlling what goes out and comes in over its closely watched Web universe as it continues its campaign to squelch any media opposition to its authority.

“Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party’s propaganda,” said Reporters Without Borders, which defends imprisoned journalists and press freedom throughout the world. “This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively.”

The decision in question is China’s Ministry of Information edict to the nation’s blogs and Web sites to register with the authorities or be closed down by the end of the month.

China says the Internet is harming the country. “Regulating the Internet has become a fundamental task in nurturing the development of the Internet in China,” said Xinhua News, the government news agency that functions as an official mouthpiece. “The Internet has played important roles in the economy and cultural lives, but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people’s spirits and caused harmful effects on the development of teenagers,” Xinhua wrote May 31.

The scale of the problem is potentially enormous.

“The country’s Internet control system employed more than 30,000 persons and was allegedly the largest in the world,” the U.S. State Department said earlier this year in its report on China in its annual review of human rights around the world.

According to a 2002 Harvard University report, the Chinese government blocked at least 19,000 sites during a six-month period and may have blocked as many as 50,000.

“At times, the government blocked the sites of some major foreign news organizations, health organizations, educational institutions, Taiwanese and Tibetan businesses and organizations, religious and spiritual organizations, democracy activists and sites discussing the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The number of blocked sites appeared to increase around major political events and sensitive dates,” the U.S. State Department report said.

Despite its roaring economy, China still doesn’t have a free press. That can make it hard for business leaders as well as Chinese citizens to get timely, accurate information about important developments like SARS. A Chinese reporter was jailed a few years ago for accurately reporting a change in interest rates.

Chinese-language newspapers are becoming bolder but self-censor as they strive to gauge how far they can push China’s tolerance for truth. When they go too far, their editors are fired or imprisoned for violating unwritten standards, and their publications are sometimes shuttered. Reporters for muckraking Hong Kong newspapers like Apple Daily are barred from entering the country. The Committee to Protect Journalists calls China “the world’s leading jailer of journalists,” with more than 40 journalists imprisoned.

Newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune are allowed in China, but circulation is limited to a few thousand copies a day nationwide, so the newspapers are sold only in business hotels. Foreigners visiting China may wonder why their morning papers aren’t delivered until late afternoon. It isn’t due to bad service in five-star hotels but a time lag required by censors, who from time to time throw out the morning’s entire shipment.

Despite China’s army of Internet monitors and censors, the Internet has been a hard to suppress outlet for dissent in China. Web sites critical of the government are frequently blocked, and those posting criticism risk being tracked down and punished. But they have tended to pop up again elsewhere on the Web.

That may soon end. The Chinese government has a new system for monitoring Web sites in real time, Reporters Without Borders said. “The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad, where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems,” the organization said.

China’s crackdown on bloggers and Web sites comes as it takes a tough line on the traditional press. A well-respected foreign correspondent for The Straits Times, Singapore’s leading newspaper, has been held incommunicado since April 22 in China. His wife said he had been trying to get a copy of a secret book by a retired Communist Party official criticizing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

China said the reporter, Ching Cheong, had confessed to being a paid spy. His wife said that was untrue and that he was pro-Beijing. If he is convicted of spying, he could face the death penalty.

Meanwhile the case of Zhao Yan, a Chinese researcher for The New York Times accused of revealing state secrets, was turned over to prosecutors last month. In Chinese courts, that step normally leads to conviction. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has appealed for his release, and the Times has said Zhao did not provide it with state secrets.